Gulag

A map of the main Gulag camps, which existed from 1923 to 1961, based on data from the Human Rights Society «Memorial»

Soviet Union

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The Gulag (Russian: ГУЛаг, tr. GULag; IPA: [ɡʊˈlak] ( listen)) was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems.^[1] While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

GULag is the acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (Russian: Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й и коло́ний, tr. Glavnoye upravlyeniye ispravityel'no-trudovih lagyeryey i koloniy) of the NKVD. It was officially created on April 25, 1930 and dissolved on January 13, 1960.^[2]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, introduced the term to the Western world with the 1973 publication of his The Gulag Archipelago. The book likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and depicted the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.^{[3][neutrality is disputed]} Some scholars^[quantify] concur with this view,^[4][5] whereas others^[quantify] argue that the Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented,^[6] and it did not have death camps,^[7] although during some periods of its history, mortality was high in the labor camps.^[3]

In March 1940, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in the USSR.^[6] Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.^[8]

[edit] Brief history

Gulag prisoner population statistics from 1934 to 1953^[9][10]

Approximately 14 million people passed through the Gulag labour camps from 1929 to 1953. A further 6-7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4-5 million passed through labour colonies.^[11] The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.^[6]

According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.^[6] These estimates exclude the deaths due to mistreatment in the camps,^[12] and such deaths happened frequently.^[13] The death toll is stated as 1,258,537 with the post-release deaths included, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953.^[14]

Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time.^[15] Petty criminals and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment.^[16][17] About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned without trial; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences handed out by the secret police throughout 1921-1953.^[18] The Gulag was reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953.

In 1960 the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD) (МВД or ru. Министерство внутренних дел) ceased to function as the Soviet wide administration of the camps in favor of individual republic MVD branches. The centralized detention facilities temporarily ceased functioning.^[19] Political prisoners were detained during the Gorbachev era.^[20]

[edit] Modern usage and other terminology

Although the term Gulag originally referred to a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting: the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.

Even more broadly, Gulag has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the meat-grinder: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.^[21]

Western authors use Gulag to denote all the prisons and internment camps located in the Soviet Union. The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression “North Korea's Gulag”^[22] for camps operational still today.^[23]

The word Gulag was not often used in Russian — either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were the camps (лагеря, lagerya) and the zone (зона, zona), usually singular — for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, corrective labor camp, was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.

[edit] History

[edit] Background

During 1920-50, the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet state considered repressions as a tool for securing the normal functioning of the state system as well as preserving and strengthening positions of their social base, presented by working class, in society. From a social class perspective, the Gulag is an offspring of the working class which became a leading class of society after the October Revolution. It was invented to isolate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements (real and imaginary ones) whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the so called dictatorship of the proletariat.

After having appeared as an instrument and place for isolating counterrevolutionary and criminal elements, the Gulag, because of its principle of “correction by forced labor”, quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. Hence it is followed by one more important reason for the constancy of the repressive policy, namely, the state's interest in unremitting rates of receiving the cheap labor force that was forcibly used mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north.^[24] The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions.^[25]

According to Anne Applebaum, approximately 6000 katorga convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 in 1916.^[3][26] From 1918, camp-type detention facilities were set up, as a reformed analogy of the earlier system of penal labor (katorgas), operated in Siberia in Imperial Russia. The two main types were Vechecka Special-purpose Camps (особые лагеря ВЧК, osobiye lagerya VChK) and forced labor camps (лагеря принудительных работ, lagerya prinuditel'nikh rabot). Various categories of prisoners were defined: petty criminals, POWs of the Russian Civil War, officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, political enemies, dissidents and other people deemed dangerous for the state. In 1928 there were 30,000 individuals interned; the authorities were opposed to compelled labour. In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration wrote:

The exploitation of prison labor, the system of squeezing ‘golden sweat’ from them, the organization of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.”^[27]

The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of corrective labor camps (Russian: исправительно-трудовые лагеря, Ispravitel'no-trudovye lagerya), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the Gulag, was a secret decree of Sovnarkom of July 11, 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929.

[edit] Formation and expansion under Stalin

The Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930 as the ULAG by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930. It was renamed as the Gulag in November of that year.^[2]

Prisoner labor at the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal, 1931–33

In the early 1930s a tightening of Soviet penal policy caused significant growth of the prison camp population. During the Great Purge mass arrests caused another increase in inmate numbers. Hundreds of thousands of persons were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the multiple passages of the notorious Article 58 of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of counterrevolutionary activities. Under NKVD Order № 00447 tens of thousands of inmates were executed in 1937-38.

The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis.^[28][29] In any case the development of the camp system followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet industrialization campaign. Most of the camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas as well as the realization of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects.

In 1931–32 archives indicate the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; in 1935 — approximately 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies (annual averages).^[30]

Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased more than eight times, and the number of prisoners with high education increased five times^{[citation needed]}. It resulted in their increased share in the overall composition of the camp prisoners. Among the camp prisoners, the number and share of the intelligentsia was growing at the quickest pace. Distrust, hostility, and even hatred for the intelligentsia is a common characteristic of the communist leaders. After having laid hold of unlimited power, they, as practice has shown, were simply unable to resist the temptation to mock the intelligentsia. The Stalin version of mocking the intelligentsia was the referral of its part to the Gulag on the basis of far-fetched or fabricated charges. For unrepressed part of the intelligentsia, the mockery was prepared in the form of “ideological dressing down”, leading and guiding instructions “from above” on how to think, do, worship the “leaders”, etc.^[24]

[edit] During World War II

Road construction by inmates of the Dalstroy (part of the 'Road of Bones' from Magadan to Jakutsk).

On the eve of World War II, Soviet archives indicate a combined camp and colony population upwards of 1.6 million in 1939, according to V. P. Kozlov.^[30] Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde estimate that 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in Gulag system's prison camps and colonies when the war started.^[31][32]

After the German invasion of Poland that marked the start of WWII, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens^[33][34] and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the gulag camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political and antistate (espionage, terrorism) crimes in USSR in 1939-41 was 211,106.^[18]

Approximately 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the 'Polish Defensive War'.^[35] Almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered (see Katyn massacre) or sent to GULag^[36] Of the 10,000-12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940-1941, most POWs, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East.^[37] Out of Anders' 80,000 evacuees from Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947.^[38]

During the war, Gulag populations declined sharply due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942–43. In the winter of 1941 a quarter of the Gulag's population died of starvation.^[39] 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941-43.^[40][41]

In 1943, the term katorga works (каторжные работы) was reintroduced. They were initially intended for Nazi collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners (for example, members of deported peoples who fled from exile) were also sentenced to katorga works. Prisoners sentenced to katorga works were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime and many of them perished.^[41]

[edit] After World War II

After World War II the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies, again, rose sharply, reaching approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 million of whom were in camps).

When the war ended in May 1945, as many as two million former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated into the USSR.^[42] On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union.^[43] One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets. British and U.S. civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left the Russian Empire and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945-1947.^[44]

Often, one finds statements that Soviet POWs on their return to the Soviet Union were often treated as traitors (see Order No. 270).^[45][46][47] According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag.^[48][49][50] However, that is a confusion with two other types of camps. During and after World War II, freed PoWs went to special filtration camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 percent were cleared, and about 8 percent were arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated Ostarbeiter, PoWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, the major part of the population of these camps were cleared by NKVD and either sent home or conscripted (see table for details).^[51] 226,127 out of 1,539,475 POWs were transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.^[51][52]

After Nazi Germany's defeat, ten NKVD-run special camps subordinate to the Gulag were set up in the Soviet Occupation Zone of post-war Germany. These special camps were former Stalags, prisons, or Nazi concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen (special camp number 7) and Buchenwald (special camp number 2). According to German government estimates 65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them.^[53] According to German researchers, Sachsenhausen, where 12,500 Soviet era victims have been uncovered, should be seen as an integral part of the Gulag system.^[54]

During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit center for prisoners sent to the Kolyma camps.

For years after World War II, a significant^{[citation needed]} minority^[vague] of the inmates were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians from lands newly incorporated into the Soviet Union, as well as Finns, Poles, Volga Germans, Romanians and others.^{[citation needed]} POWs, in contrast, were kept in a separate camp system (see POW labor in the Soviet Union), which was managed by GUPVI, a separate main administration with the NKVD/MVD.^{[citation needed]}

Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms, sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465 thousand were political prisoners.^[41]

The state continued to maintain the extensive camp system for a while after Stalin's death in March 1953, although the period saw the grip of the camp authorities weaken and a number of conflicts and uprisings occur (see Bitch Wars; Kengir uprising; Vorkuta uprising).

The amnesty in March 1953 was limited to non-political prisoners and for political prisoners sentenced to not more than 5 years, therefore mostly those convicted for common crimes were then freed. The release of political prisoners started in 1954 and became widespread, and also coupled with mass rehabilitations, after Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in his Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956.

By the end of the 1950s, virtually all corrective labor camps were dissolved. Colonies, however, continued to exist. Officially the Gulag was liquidated by the MVD order No 020 of 25 January 1960.^[2]

(See also Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union)

[edit] Conditions

Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact of broader events (World War II, countrywide famines and shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large numbers of prisoners). However, to one degree or another, the large majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations, inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing, poor hygiene, and inadequate health care. Most prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor.^[55] In most periods and economic branches, the degree of mechanization of work processes was significantly lower than in the civilian industry: tools were often primitive and machinery, if existent, short in supply. Officially established work hours were in most periods longer and days off were fewer than for civilian workers. Often official work time regulations were extended by local camp administrators.

Andrei Vyshinsky, procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memorandum to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov in 1938 which stated:

Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.^[56]

The White Sea – Baltic Canal was the first major project constructed in the Soviet Union using forced labor.

Shack from Gulag - reconstruction in Museum of the Occupation of Latvia

In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition allowing the fulfillment of construction and production plans handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet production quota), they instituted a number of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments (from 1950 onwards), cuts of individual sentences, general early-release schemes for norm fulfillment and overfulfillment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946 onwards), preferential treatment, and privileges for the most productive workers (shock workers or Stakhanovites in Soviet parlance).^[57]

A distinctive incentive scheme that included both coercive and motivational elements and was applied universally in all camps consisted in standardized nourishment scales: the size of the inmates’ ration depended on the percentage of the work quota delivered. Naftaly Frenkel is credited for the introduction of this policy. While it was effective in compelling many prisoners to work harder, for many a prisoner it had the adverse effect, accelerating the exhaustion and sometimes causing the death of persons unable to fulfill high production quota.

Immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the conditions in camps worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final period and after the end of the war.

Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates, it is important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates:

• kulaks, osadniks, ukazniks (people sentenced for violation of various ukases, such as Law of Spikelets, decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of criminal law
• dedicated criminals: thieves in law
• people sentenced for various political and religious reasons

Mortality in Gulag camps in 1934-40 was 4-6 times higher than average in Russia. The estimated total number of those who died in imprisonment in 1930-1953 is 1.76 million, about half of which occurred between 1941-1943 following the German invasion.^[58][59] If prisoner deaths from labor colonies and special settlements are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, although the historian who compiled this estimate (J. Otto Pohl) stresses that it is incomplete, and doesn't cover all prisoner categories for every year.^[13][60] Other scholars have stressed that internal discrepancies in archival material suggests that the NKVD Gulag data are seriously incomplete.^[14] Adam Jones wrote:

It was these Siberian camps, devoted either to gold-mining or timber harvesting, that inflicted the greatest toll in the Gulag system. Such camps “can only be described as extermination centres,” according to Leo Kuper. The camp network that came to symbolize the horrors of the Gulag was centered on the Kolyma gold-fields, where “outside work for prisoners was compulsory until the temperature reached −50C and the death rate among miners in the goldfields was estimated at about 30 per cent per annum.^[61]

[edit] Social conditions

The convicts in such camps were actively involved in all kinds of labor with one of them being logging (lesopoval). The working territory of logging presented by itself a square and was surrounded by forest clearing. Thus, all attempts to exit or escape from it were well observed from the four towers set at each of its corners.

When investigating the shooting of these escaping prisoners, the position of the dead body was usually the only factor considered^{[citation needed]}. That the body would lie with its feet to the camp and its head away from it was considered sufficient evidence of an escape attempt. As a result, it was common practice for the guards to simply adjust the position of the body after killing a runner to ensure that the killing would be declared justified.^{[citation needed]} There is some evidence that money rewards were given to any guards who shot an escaping prisoner, but the official rules (as seen below) state guards were fined for escaping prisoners.^{[citation needed]}

Locals who captured a runaway were given rewards.^[62] Its also said that Gulags in colder areas were less concerned with finding escaped prisoners as they would die anyhow from the cold and severe winters. Prisoners who did escape without getting shot were often found dead miles away from the camp.

[edit] Geography

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Part of 'Project 503' to build a railroad from Salekhard to Igarka near Turukhansk on the Yenisey

In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen primarily for the isolated conditions involved. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. The site on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy, taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918.^[3] The colloquial name for the islands, Solovki, entered the vernacular as a synonym for the labor camp in general. It was presented to the world as an example of the new Soviet method for re-education of class enemies and reintegrating them through labor into Soviet society. Initially the inmates, largely Russian intelligentsia, enjoyed relative freedom (within the natural confinement of the islands). Local newspapers and magazines were published and even some scientific research was carried out (e.g., a local botanical garden was maintained, but unfortunately later lost completely). Eventually Solovki turned into an ordinary Gulag camp; in fact some historians maintain that it was a pilot camp of this type. See Solovki for more detail. In 1929 Maxim Gorky visited the camp and published an apology for it.

With the new emphasis on Gulag as the means of concentrating cheap labor, new camps were then constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, wherever the economic task at hand dictated their existence (or was designed specifically to avail itself of them, such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal or the Baikal Amur Mainline), including facilities in big cities — parts of the famous Moscow Metro and the Moscow State University new campus were built by forced labor. Many more projects during the rapid industrialization of the 1930s, war-time and post-war periods were fulfilled on the backs of convicts, and the activity of Gulag camps spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry.

The majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia (the best known clusters are Sevvostlag (The North-East Camps) along Kolyma river and Norillag near Norilsk) and in the south-eastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the steppes of Kazakhstan (Luglag, Steplag, Peschanlag). A very precise map was made by the Memorial Foundation.^[63] These were vast and sparsely inhabited regions with no roads (in fact, the construction of the roads themselves was assigned to the inmates of specialized railroad camps) or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were generally spread throughout the entire Soviet Union, including the European parts of Russia, Belarus, a